the prisoner greco:
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and yet, i can often-times clearly distinguish thought from any and all mental imagery, and i have on numerous occasions noticed a marked absence of any affective tone whatsoever from the sensations i experience. what i experience is that when there is no somatic charge underlying it, neither affect nor imagery occur (and with no practical incapacitation suffered).
It seems like we are on the same page finally.
When I say affective tone, I experience it rather one experiences the subtle sense of emotion carried by a musical tone (and this may be the basis for it in this experience).
I am aware of a sense of "meaning" or relevance to the body-mind that may appear to be independent of the sensations, but when I try to look at that sense of meaning it always deconstructs into subtle sensations that are essentially empty. This has lead me to conclude that the sensations have their own intrinsic syntax at this level - that is, below the level of symbolic representation. Rather the way that music has an intrinsic syntax and inherent meaning, in fact.
Now there is some technical difficulty in making this interpretation, because the meaning is very associated with the sense of awareness itself - and as soon as you turn to look at it, you are not looking at it, but rather a phantom of it, a memory, and it becomes the new object of the meaning making.
There is something similar to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work here.